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Writing during the occupation of France in the 1940s, the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel sees the core authentic form of hope as “I hope in thee for us.” A strength of Marcel's account is that it drives home the importance of hope-in and hope-for, against preoccupation with hope-that. The trouble is that he then marginalizes hope-that, in a worry over its vulnerability to defeat and in a quest for an absolute hope. Marcel in fact emphasizes and interlinks two quite general hopes-that—rock-bottom hope that all is not lost, and transcendent hope of salvation. He also sees imprisonment—by illness, in a land under occupation, in an actual jail—as a paradigmatic case of hope's struggle against despair. Accordingly, there are important similarities with Emile Durkheim's classic account of the two main modern routes to suicide. One is the egoism of a cold intellectual atomistic world of the self, cut off from the warmth of social feelings. The other is the anomie of a raging bonfire of desires, impossible to dampen down and bring under conscious control.

W. Watts Miller is recently retired from the University of Bristol, where he was lecturer in sociology and philosophy. He is the author of Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity (1996) in the McGill‐Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas series and is editor of the journal Durkheimian Studies. He has contributed to Debating Durkheim (1994) and, more recently, Virtue Ethics and Sociology: Issues of Modernity and Religion (2001).

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